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Some claim that freelancing, self-employment, whatever you want to call it, is surging in developed economies. For example: More...

Owner-drivers
You’ll recall the mess last year in the attempts to destroy the businesses of owner-drivers in Australia.

However, the Victorian government is now reviewing its owner-driver laws, laws that we say are pretty good as they stand. We don’t think the review is looking to set up price-fixing as happened under the disbanded federal law. But Federal Labor voted to keep the disbanded laws. Who knows what the Victorian Labor government’s agenda might be? We urge owner-drivers to keep a close eye on this. More...

There’s no question that the status of independent contractors is under massive attack in the USA from regulators, courts and activist lawyers. We’ve been following this for some time.

The giant transport company FedEx has for years been fighting to defend the independent contractor status of its drivers. But, in California, FedEx has now agreed to pay $228 million in compensation. This follows a 2014 Californian court ruling that FedEx ‘misclassified’ its drivers as independent contractors.  More...

Ken Phillips is in Canada at the moment launching the Entrepreneurial Index (EI) in partnership with the Frontier Centre. ICA has been working on this for four years and finally it’s all go!

The Entrepreneurial Index assesses the impact of government laws, regulations and their administration on the ability of people to be self-employed and hence entrepreneurial. It gives a score out of 100.  More...

ICA has previously discussed the dire situation facing self-employed people in Massachusetts. It is clear that its anti-self-employment laws are blatantly discriminatory. If anything, the situation in 'mad Massachusetts' seems to be getting worse. Our friends at ‘New Jobs for Massachusetts’ have provided us with a story about ‘Heinz’, a specialist electrical contractor who tried to set up business in Massachusetts. He was literally forced to leave the state because of its ‘dumb’ laws. And now it appears that franchise operations are in disarray because of those same anti-contractor laws.  More...

In recent times we've heard of a number of cases where local tax authorities have made it difficult to engage independent contractors. This sort of story is not confined to Australia. In fact, it is common and global. I had several days of discussion with the Professional Contractors Group in London last week. Their tax problems under IR35 continue unabated. More...

As much as they say they love entrepreneurs, politicians’ policies all too frequently damage entrepreneurship.

Here’s the latest update on the USA ‘misclassification’ laws.  More...

 ICA’s Ken Phillips met with the Massachusetts House Small Business Caucus in October 2013 in Boston.  The members are concerned that Massachusetts' anti-independent contractor laws  suppress jobs growth in Massachusetts. More...